When June 20—the planned departure date—finally arrived, events unfolded like a comedy with a tragic dénouement. In the royal apartments at the Tuileries, details of the voyage were still being sorted out as the day went on. Monsieur Léonard, the queen’s hairdresser, was added to the passenger list shortly before three in the afternoon and summarily packed into a carriage without being told where he was going, while the royal governess, Madame de Tourzel, was said to have objected to arrangements that had her traveling in a carriage separate from her charges. Meanwhile, horses and carriages of all variety— a hackney cab, a fiacre, a cabriolet, a berlin—were being deposited at locations in and around the city of Paris, where they would be picked up, driven, and exchanged throughout the day. Overseen by Marie Antoinette’s rumored paramour, the Swedish count Axel von Fersen, these and other maneuvers were designed to whisk the royal family safely out of the most closely guarded site in Paris and, from there, far beyond the city walls.
Much of the entourage was already on the move by the time the principal players donned the clothing of servants, couriers, and other commoners to camouflage themselves as they began making their way out of the Tuileries. They started to leave around ten o’clock at night, the end of the working day for many of the palace staff. One by one, they stepped into the courtyard at intervals that sometimes stretched to forty-five minutes, doing their best to blend into the flow of men and women walking toward the street. The process was just beginning when Lafayette and Bailly wandered into the scene. By chance, Lafayette had stopped by Bailly’s home before turning in for the night. There, he heard news that, both men agreed, should be shared with the king. So off they went to the Tuileries, where Lafayette’s carriage nearly ran directly into Marie Antoinette, and where Madame de Tourzel, waiting in the fiacre with the children, spotted him. The queen was shaken, but Lafayette did not notice her. Inside, Lafayette and Bailly found the king, who, having dismissed his servants for the night, was about to follow behind his wife. The three men conversed for what must have seemed like days to Louis XVI. Finally, sometime after eleven o’clock, the unwelcome visitors took their leave, and the king slipped out the door near midnight. Despite the delays and near misses, the first hurdle of the royal flight had been cleared.
With 160 miles still to cover between Paris and Montmédy, the danger of discovery remained high. The monarchs had chosen a well-traveled route requiring at least nineteen stops to exchange horses along the way, and the choice of yellow as the color of their vehicles did nothing to render them less conspicuous. Nonetheless, with Paris receding farther and farther into the distance, spirits inside the carriages began to lift. As the governess remembered it, Louis XVI passed the time reading aloud the declaration soon to be heard in the National Assembly; “then looking at his watch, which marked eight o’clock, he said, ‘La Fayette just now does not know what to do with himself.’ ” Apparently, the very thought of Lafayette’s awkward situation brought the travelers a degree of joy.
Their mirth was to be short-lived. They were more than halfway to their destination when they rode into Sainte-Menehould on June 22. By the time they reached the city gates, local officials were already suspicious, their interest piqued by the curious arrival and departure of first one, then another detachment of mounted soldiers. In both cases, their officers carried orders signed by the despised Bouillé containing a cover story involving “a treasure,” due to arrive shortly, that would require an escort to the border. When two carriages, accompanied by couriers in chamois-colored livery, reached the relay post, they aroused the interest of the postmaster, Jean-Baptiste Drouet. As Drouet told the story, the horses were being changed when, out of idle curiosity, he peered into the waiting carriage; there he noticed the queen, whose face he thought he recognized. Looking at the man seated to her left, Drouet “was struck by the resemblance between his physiognomy and the effigy of the king printed on an assignat [paper currency introduced in 1790] that I was carrying.” This was not an entirely unexpected development. In fact, Louis had been so fearful of recognition that, against the advice of Bouillé, he had charted a route circumventing Reims, the site of his coronation, where he believed that his countenance would be too familiar. Evidently, he had not considered that the assignats bore his profile, encircled by the words “Louis XVI King of the French,” so that any man he passed on the road might have his portrait in his purse. As the story goes, at least one man did, and his tale was repeated by journalists and printmakers seeking to insert a moment of levity into an episode that was, in all other respects, deadly serious.
Assignat worth 100 livres featuring the profile of Louis XVI at the upper center. (illustration credit 17.1)
The King Eating Pigs’ Feet at Sainte-Menehould, the Postmaster Comes Across an Assignat and Recognizes the King. Engraving. 1791. (illustration credit 17.2)
Once the carriages had vanished from sight, Drouet and a comrade leapt to their horses and raced to the town of Varennes. There, they hoped to stop the royal caravan. Reaching Varennes at eleven-thirty in the dark of night, the men dispatched a local innkeeper to spread word of the king’s arrival before blocking the bridge leading out of the town with an array of vehicles, including a nearby cart filled with old furniture. In less than five minutes, Drouet and a colleague, the mayor and the National Guard commander of Varennes, greeted the approaching carriages—now accompanied by some 150 mounted troops—at the bridge with eight other armed men. Passports were demanded. While the assembled citizens debated the validity of the documents and the identity of their owners, Louis XVI revealed himself, saying, “Here is my wife, here are my children, we beseech you to accord us that regard which the French have always accorded to their king.” By this time, one hundred citizens, many of them armed, had gathered in the street. Soon, the National Guard would have two cannons trained on the hussars. The king was lost.
Until word of the arrest reached Paris, Lafayette faced his own set of dangers. On the night of June 21, representatives from the various factions on the left temporarily set aside their differences to meet at the Jacobin headquarters. There, Georges Danton, the editor of Révolutions de Paris, denounced Lafayette. As his newspaper reported it, Danton boomed that, since “Monsieur the Commander General swore on his life that the king would not leave, we must have either the person of the king or the head of Monsieur the Commander General.” He had long suspected that Lafayette was an enemy of the revolution, and the events of “June 21 removed all doubt.” Danton was addressing Lafayette directly when he declared “the most astonishing” fact of the day to be that “people, on first hearing of the escape of Louis XVI, did not set upon your person.” Harking back to the murders of July 14, 1789, he added that “Flesselle and Delaunay paid with their heads for treason less criminal than yours.” The loyalty of the troops, the loyalty of their officers, and the loyalty of the Paris sections (the city’s neighborhood governments) all had to be confirmed, but the loyalty of Lafayette was particularly suspect. “The general of an army of thirty thousand men, who permits the escape of an entire family,” declared the paper, “is criminal or imbecile.… Soldiers of the nation, he has lost the right to command you.”
Fortunately for Lafayette, a messenger arrived from Varennes with news of the king’s discovery on June 22, before anyone had acted on Danton’s call. In a show of unity, three deputies, representing the political left, center, and right, were dispatched to meet the monarchs, who had already started on the return trip to Paris. So crowded was the road with onlookers that the somber caravan required several days to deliver its passengers to the Tuileries, where Lafayette promptly presented himself. As he recalled, he attempted to assume a deferential stance. “Does Your Majesty have any order to give me?” Lafayette asked. Through bitter laughter, the king replied, “It seems to me that I am subject to your orders more than you are to mine.”
Lafayette’s position was growing increasingly untenable. While those on the left held him responsible for the king’s escape, par
tisans on the right blamed him for the ignominious spectacle of the royal family’s return. The Comte d’Espinchal observed with disgust that Lafayette had “issued orders that no honors should be accorded to the king, and forbade even the doffing of hats. This worthy commander of a troupe of rebels and troublemakers [factieux] is, at this moment, the jailer of his sovereign and of the entire royal family.” A letter, written by Bouillé from the safety of Luxembourg and read into the record of the National Assembly on June 30, accused Lafayette of standing “at the head” of the party that hoped to replace the monarchy with a republic. Lafayette’s “secret ambition,” wrote Bouillé, drives “him toward the only goal he has”: establishing a government that would be “monstrous for us.”
This double accusation—of ambition and republicanism—was more than Lafayette could bear. Two days later, he appeared before the assembly to refute what he termed Bouillé’s “calumny.” “I am denounced as an enemy of the form of government that you have established,” he stormed to vigorous applause. “Messieurs, I will not renew my oath, but I am prepared to shed my blood to uphold it.” Lafayette’s discomfort with his role in the king’s return did not decrease with the passing of years. Writing in his memoirs decades later, Lafayette sought to absolve himself of responsibility by reminding readers that, “happily for him (after the atrocities suffered by these august victims), it was not to his orders, but to the accident of being recognized by a postmaster … that their arrest was due.”
When the sun rose over a sharply divided Paris at nine minutes past four on Sunday, July 17, discontent had been roiling the city for weeks. The flight to Varennes was just one of the contributing factors. As the historian David Andress has shown, tens of thousands of men had been tossed into the ranks of the unemployed thanks to the closure of a work relief project in mid-June, and these workers, having passed through two years of impromptu schooling in political action, continued to report to work at jobs that were no longer available as they began petitioning the authorities and protesting in the streets. Struggling to maintain order, Bailly and Lafayette deployed the National Guard to break up the workers’ gatherings—a move that only compounded the animosity felt by those protesters, who saw the National Guard in general, and Lafayette in particular, as complicit in the king’s flight. Mutual distrust continued to mount, with more and more Parisians from nearly every level of society being arrested for insulting, threatening, or assaulting the members of the guard. Andress reports that one man was brought in for opining “in a loud voice” that “it was astonishing that [Lafayette’s] head was not on the end of a pike,” while another was arrested for averring that Lafayette and Bailly deserved to be hanged.
It was against this turbulent background that the National Assembly stunned a sizable portion of the populace on July 15 by passing legislation clearing Louis XVI of criminal wrongdoing in his attempted escape and leaving the king at the head of the very government he had so recently disdained. Whatever misgivings individual deputies may have felt, their decision was nearly unanimous. The vast majority, apparently, deemed it unwise to disband the monarchy in such unsettled times. As a group, they took cover behind Bouillé’s letter, which, aside from castigating Lafayette, indicated that the blame for the king’s flight rested entirely on Bouillé’s shoulders.
Reactions were swift and loud. Calls for the creation of a French republic went up at the Palais-Royal and at Danton’s headquarters, and crowds marched to the Jacobins’ meeting room, hoping to unite the left under the republican standard. The Marquis de Ferrières told his wife that “all the firebrands of the capital were unleashed that very evening in the clubs, in the cafés, shouting horrors against Louis XVI and against the Assembly.” One group, he reported, tried to close down the Comédie Française and the Opéra but was repelled by the National Guard. The next day, Gouverneur Morris wrote to his fellow American patriot Robert Morris (no relation) that “much Heat” had been generated against the deputies. Observing that “the People are now assembling … and the Militia (many of them opposed to the King) are out,” he deemed it “far from improbable that I shall have a Battle under my Windows.” The National Assembly shared his fear. On July 16, Bailly was summoned before the chamber and instructed, among other things, to produce an address to the people of Paris explaining “the principles that dictated yesterday’s decree” and to ensure “public tranquility.”
Some of the “heat” Bailly was asked to cool had generated spontaneously, but political factions were busily fanning the flames. Danton’s followers were apparently behind the march to the Jacobins, and many believed that the Duc d’Orléans had had a hand in the tumult as well. As Lafayette related the tale in his memoirs, Choderlos de Laclos, acting on behalf of Orléans, had drafted one of several petitions that began to circulate on July 16 demanding that the question of Louis XVI’s culpability be sent out to the departments to be decided by the nation at large. The plan was for those supporting the motion to gather at the site of the Bastille at daybreak, then to procede en masse to the Champ de Mars, where they would sign the petition on the altar of the nation—the same altar that had been consecrated one year and three days earlier by Lafayette. Throughout the night and into the morning, members of the National Guard skirmished with would-be signers, who nonetheless made their way to the Champ de Mars early on July 17.
The violence began before noon. Two men, having inexplicably concealed themselves beneath the altar, along with assorted woodworking equipment and a bottle of wine, were spotted and seized by a group of protesters. Convinced that the pair were planting explosives to disrupt the proceedings, the crowd hanged the men from a lamppost, hacked off their heads, and mounted these bloody trophies on pikes. Another man made an attempt on Lafayette’s life only to have his pistol misfire at close range. Eventually, the main event got under way. As the afternoon wore on, some six thousand men and women managed to sign their names or, in many cases, leave their marks on the petition. For a few hours, it seemed that order had been restored.
But news of the newfound calm did not reach the National Assembly until the deputies had already renewed their demand that the municipal authorities keep the peace. In the heat of the late-morning debate, Michel-Louis-Étienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély went so far as to insist that “were I to be a victim, like those citizens who have just perished, I would demand the proclamation of martial law!” Ignoring murmurs on the extreme left, the assembly supported Regnaud. During the late afternoon, Bailly ordered red flags to be raised, and with that martial law was declared in Paris. Around seven in the evening, Bailly set off from the Hôtel de Ville accompanied by a battalion of grenadiers of the National Guard to rendezvous with Lafayette at the entrance to the Champ de Mars, where Bailly intended to order the crowd to disperse.
According to Lafayette, their arrival was “greeted by a hailstorm of rocks,” and soon thereafter, a pistol shot barely missed the mayor as he attempted “to make his proclamation.” In the midst of this attack, the National Guard fired into the air. These were warning shots, Lafayette insisted, “meant to avoid injuring anyone.” But the assailants were “emboldened by this moderation” and “redoubled their attack against the municipal offers and the National Guard.” Two volunteer chasseurs were killed, whereupon “the National Guard fired in earnest [tout de bon].” Lafayette’s account is vague on the numbers of casualties, maintaining that “the losses on the side of the assailants have been insanely exaggerated; the crowd was dispersed by the cavalry, which injured no one.”
Lafayette’s was just one of the many accounts of that day, and it was not destined to become the dominant one. In 1910, the French historian Albert Mathiez—a staunch supporter of Robespierre, a committed socialist, and the founder of the influential journal Annales de la révolution française, which dominated academic French studies of the revolution for much of the twentieth century—painted quite a different picture by compiling and analyzing the testimonies of scores of participants and eyewitnesses. M
athiez had numerous axes to grind and gleaned much of his evidence from investigations launched by Lafayette’s nemeses. Nonetheless, his findings, which have had a tremendous influence on the study of the event, indicate the diversity of reports that circulated during the summer of 1791, with nearly every point of Lafayette’s story being contradicted by someone in Mathiez’s compendium.
Several people, including Bailly himself, maintained that the mayor never even began to read aloud the proclamation declaring martial law. Moreover, although the legislation required that Bailly enter the stadium ahead of the soldiers, presumably to permit the crowd to disperse of its own free will, Bailly instead trailed the cavalry, which entered the stadium at full charge. Others testified that the National Guard began firing when a shot rang out from the crowd gathered on the embankment—a shot, some said, that was merely a misfire. According to other accounts, rocks were thrown only after the fusillade began. And although one witness claimed that Lafayette ordered the National Guard to hold their fire, neither Lafayette nor his officers were able to control their men. In some versions, the crowd started fleeing after the first round of shots, only to be hunted down by chasseurs who broke ranks, swinging their sabers wildly. Perhaps the most hotly contested part of the story involves the number of casualties: one author, apparently in Lafayette’s camp, noted ten deaths and twenty injuries; another man avowed that he had returned to the field after midnight and counted fifty-four bodies strewn about the streets; and Marat wrote that four hundred corpses had been thrown into the river overnight, on Bailly’s orders. To this day, we have no solid grasp on the death toll.
If the battle fought with rocks and guns was more or less over by midnight, the war of rhetoric was just getting started. At the July 25 meeting of Danton’s Cordeliers club, the membership invoked the specter of a bloody episode in the sixteenth-century wars of religion by terming July 17 the “Patriot’s Saint Bartholomew’s day.” The Révolutions de Paris commenced its vivid retelling on the title page of issue 106. It began: “Blood flowed in the field of the federation; the altar of the nation is dyed with it; men, women had their throats slit; citizens are in a state of consternation.”
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